Data Science: Why Humans Are Just as Important as Math - InformationWeek

Recommendation algorithms that predict what we'll want to watch, buy, and read are now ubiquitous, in part thanks to advances in computing power. But while today's data science tools can sift through mounds of data to unearth patterns at levels of scale and speed that humans alone could never achieve, our models remain inadequate in fully understanding data and its applications, especially when the data becomes messy in reflecting fickle human behaviors. Data science is a craft that relies on human intuition and creativity to understand multi-faceted problem spaces. Without human oversight, it operates on an incomplete picture, for which the implications have never been clearer in the present COVID-19 age as our algorithms struggle to grasp the reality that human behaviors don't follow mathematics. March 2020 marked the start of a series of behaviors that would have seemed unusual just weeks prior: As COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, we started stockpiling toilet paper, Googling hand sanitizer, and searching for masks.